Hitler's War (9 page)

“With our tongues,” Saul broke in.

“That’s disgusting!” Sarah exclaimed.

“That’s why they do it,” her brother said, and then, “Bastards!” again.

“Anyhow, they looked at my papers. I showed them my scar,” Samuel Goldman said. “I showed them the letter. I showed them the Iron Cross, but it was only Second Class, not First.” He shrugged. “I was a corporal. Almost impossible for an enlisted man to get an Iron Cross, First Class, in the last war.”

“The
Führer
did,” Sarah said. He was proud of it, too. He wore it on his left breast pocket all the time.

Father sighed. “I know. But he was one of a handful. The
Feldwebel
told me to be sure to hang on to the papers. ‘You can’t wear the uniform again,’ he said, ‘but that stuff may save your bacon anyway.’ Then he laughed like a loon, because he thought saving a Jew’s bacon was funny.”

“What do you think he meant?” Sarah asked.

“Well, things aren’t
as
bad for us because I’m a veteran,” Father answered. “Even the Nazis respect that some. Not enough, but some.”

“I can’t say I’m really sorry they did turn you down,” Mother said. “Now I won’t have to worry about the two of you off at the ends of the earth with nasty people shooting at you.”

Father only sighed. “Plenty of things closer to home to worry about. Where are we going to find money? What will they do to us? We should have got out before the war started. Too late now. One of the things I thought was—” He broke off.

“What?” Sarah asked it before Mother could. Or, more likely, Mother already knew.

Samuel Goldman looked at her. “If your brother and I—or even one of us—got into the
Wehrmacht
, nobody could say we weren’t proper Germans. Nobody would do anything to the family because we weren’t proper Germans, either.” He gave Mother an ironic nod. “We might have been safer at the front than here in Münster, you know.”

Mother’s mouth twisted. “Don’t talk about such things.”

“Why not? It’s not as if talking about them makes them come true.” But then Father was the one who looked as if he’d bitten down on a lemon. Hitler had spent years talking about all the things he wanted to do to Jews. He talked about them, and talked about them, and talked about them—and the more he talked, the more of them did come true.

That was why Father didn’t teach Roman history at the university any more. Jews were forbidden from holding academic positions. Father still made some money writing articles for the monumental Pauly-Wissowa
Real-Encyclopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft:
basically, a multivolume encyclopedia of everything that was known about ancient Greece and Rome, up to the sixth century
A.D.
Samuel Goldman wasn’t the only displaced Jewish professor putting cash in his pocket and bread on his table that way. If you had an Aryan academic friend who would steer things your way—who would, sometimes, put his name on what you’d written…You wouldn’t get rich, but you might get by.

Editors paid by the page, too. Jewish scholars had written some monumental articles because of that. Scholars of the next generation would have a hard time finding anything more to say about quite a few topics.

If, of course, the next generation cared a pfennig’s worth about classical antiquity. Maybe all the Aryan scholars would study Goths and Vandals and Vikings instead of Greeks and Romans. But even then, Sarah knew, Pauly-Wissowa would help.

If anything helped, anyway…

FROM CALAIS, ALISTAIR WALSH COULD
look across the Channel and see the white cliffs of Dover smudging the northeastern horizon. He’d been in France before, in 1918. He’d been a private then, an unhappy conscript. But he’d discovered he liked soldiering, even if getting shot in the leg meant he spent Armistice Day flat on his back in a military hospital.

So here he was again, this time with the three stripes and crown of a staff sergeant on his sleeve. He’d come as far as he was likely to. They wouldn’t make him an officer even if the sky fell. He’d got what little education he owned in the army, and he had a buzzing Welsh accent.

Still, staff sergeant wasn’t bad. It beat the hell out of a lifetime in a factory or a coal mine, which he would have had if he hadn’t stayed a soldier. He could break in new men. And he could talk back to lieutenants, a lot of whom weren’t much more than half his age.

He also had the pleasure of the company of his own kind. The British army would have come to pieces without its senior sergeants, and was smart enough to know it. Lying right across the Channel from Blighty, Calais had a better notion of what made a proper pub than most foreign places. In fact, the fellow who ran the Green Duck was an Englishman. He’d got wounded during the war, too, and ended up marrying his pretty French nurse and staying behind here.

Since the British Expeditionary Force crossed, the Green Duck had become the unofficial headquarters for people like Alistair: men who’d been through the mill, who wanted a place where they could get a pint or three and sit around and drink them and have a smoke without getting bothered by officers or yapping soldiers. If they thought they knew more about what was going on than the General Staff did…well, sergeants have had such thoughts since the days of Caesar, if not since those of Hammurabi.

Walsh lit a Brutus and blew smoke up toward the dim ceiling. He turned to the man sitting next to him. “I tell you, Joe, it’s not like it was in the last go-round.”

“Too bloody right it’s not.” Joe Collins’ clotted speech said he came from London’s East End. He was a wiry little fellow, tough as a rat-catching terrier and about as sentimental. He held out a hand. “Gimme one o’ them.”

“Here you go.” Walsh handed him the packet, then leaned close to let him have a light. “It’s not, I tell you.”

“I said the same fing myself.” Collins blew out smoke, then whistled respectfully. “Bastard’s strong as the devil. Turkish blend?”

“That’s right. If you aren’t going to taste it, why smoke it?” Walsh said.

“Knocks the socks off Navy Cut Gold, it does,” Collins said.

“I should hope so.” Alistair took a pull at his pint. Some places on the Continent, they sold beer by the half-liter, which wasn’t enough. None of that nonsense at the Green Duck, though. Walsh repeated, “If you aren’t going to taste it, why smoke it? And if you aren’t going to fight, why send the bloody Expeditionary Force over here?”

“Politics.” Joe Collins turned it into the filthiest word in the world. “The froggies, they’d break out in arseholes if we wasn’t here, so we bleedin’ well are.”

“Sounds right to me,” Alistair agreed. “But say what you please about the frogs, last time around they
wanted
to have a go at the
Boche
. So did we. Everybody was dead keen to get in there and mix it up. Not now.”

“No, not now. Sufferin’ Jesus!” The other senior sergeant drained his pint and waved for another one. “The way those sorry sods are tippytoeing into ‘Unland…and they ‘aven’t moved us up towards the front at all.”

“Don’t I know it!” Alistair said. “We just sit around soaking up beer and pinching the barmaids’ bums.…”

“You try it, dearie, and you’ll draw back a bloody stump,” said the broad-shouldered blonde who brought Collins his refill. The words carried a bit of a French accent. The sentiment could have come from any British barmaid from Londonderry to Dover.

“Don’t pay him no mind, sweet’eart,” Joe Collins said. “If
I
get my mitts on you, now, you’ll love every minute of it.”

“And then you wake up,” she retorted. Away she went, with a little extra roll to her hips to show the soldiers what they were missing.

Collins chuckled. “She’d be a ‘andful and a ‘alf, she would.”

“You might say so.” But Alistair wanted to talk about the war, not women. They could always come back to women, and they probably would. For now, though…“Only ones who fight like they mean it are the Czechs—and the Germans in Czecho, too.”

“Fat lot of good it does the bloody Czechs,” Collins said. “They’d be better off if they lay down for old Adolf.”

“Tell that to the next Czech you see,” Walsh said. “Go on—I dare you. But make sure I’m there, mind, on account of I want to watch him wallop the snot out of you. And he will, too. You’re a tough bugger, Joe, but these blokes from the middle of Europe, they bloody well mean it. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“Oh, I could lick a Czech or a Pole,” Collins said. “But if I turned me back ‘arf a mo’, ‘e’d bloody well pull a knife out of ‘is boot top and give me one right in the kidney. They don’t fight fair in those parts.”

Maybe that was it. Maybe it was just that Central Europeans were dreadfully in earnest. The one who’d plugged Henlein and touched off this mess—he must have known he wouldn’t get away. He did it anyhow. A generation earlier, Gavrilo Princip and his Balkan buddies hadn’t counted the cost, either.

“I wish they’d move us forward,” Walsh said. “I don’t give a shit about hanging out my washing on the Siegfried Line, but I’d like to
see
the goddamn thing.”

“Careful what you wish for—you may get it,” Collins said.

“Not here, by God.” Alistair Walsh shook his head. “The Frenchies say they did their duty by Czecho when they stuck half of one toe into Germany. And we did ours by the Frenchies when we crossed over. Fight? Oh, no, dear!” His voice rose to a shrill, effeminate falsetto.

Joe Collins laughed. So did the Englishman behind the bar. The tap-man could afford to. He’d done his bit the last time around, and paid enough so that nobody wanted anything else from him now. Walsh soaked up the beer. This was soft duty. He knew he shouldn’t complain. Drinking pints in a Calais pub when he should have been in a trench brewing tea with hot water from the cooling jacket of his machine gun didn’t feel right, though. Somebody in charge knew damn all about what was going on.

Or maybe that somebody knew entirely too well. There was a notion more frightening still.

PRAGUE DEAD AHEAD. LUDWIG ROTHE’S
Panzer II approached the capital of Czechoslovakia from the east. Prague was surrounded, utterly cut off from any hope of relief. If the Czechs had any brains, they would surrender. If they had any brains, they would have surrendered a long time ago.

Luftwaffe
planes dropped leaflets on the capital along with bombs. Winds swept some of the leaflets far from the target. Ludwig had seen a couple of them. They showed Prague in flames while Jewish-looking men labeled
FRANCE
and
ENGLAND
played the violin. The German caption beneath them read
Your allies fiddle while Prague burns;
Ludwig presumed the Czech forest of consonants meant the same thing.

Burn Prague did. The sour smell of smoke and damp clogged the panzer commander’s nostrils. There was just enough drizzle to cut down visibility—not enough to do much against fires. Prague had been catching it since the war started. Not much of the place could still be standing. How many civilians and soldiers had died in the rain of high explosives? Ludwig could smell corpses, too.

But the Czechs fought on in the ruins, perhaps fueled by the courage of despair.
If you want us, come and get us. Come pay the butcher’s bill for us
, they seemed to say. And they were making it as expensive as they could.

Fritz Bittenfeld drove the panzer past the burnt-out hulk of a Czech T-35, and then past a dead Panzer I that had had the turret blown clean off the chassis. Ludwig winced when he saw that. Nobody’d really intended the Panzer I for anything more than a training vehicle. It didn’t have the firepower or the armor to fight other tanks.

If an emergency came along before your bigger machines were
ready, though…If that happened, you used what you had and hoped for the best. And sometimes you got it, and sometimes you bought the farm like the two sorry sons of bitches inside that baby panzer.

Ludwig knew too well his own Panzer II was only a small step up. Its main armament was a good deal better than the Panzer I’s pair of rifle-caliber machine guns. It carried thicker armor, too. But the armor wasn’t
that
much thicker. The cannon on Czech tanks had no trouble piercing it.

He looked this way, that way, the other way. While he was at it, he wished for eyes in the back of his head. Smashed buildings came closer and closer together as the
Wehrmacht
pushed into Prague’s suburbs. Tanks and antitank guns and Czech soldiers with Molotov cocktails had all kinds of places to hide.

Landsers
were supposed to root out such dangers. Panzers and foot soldiers worked best together. Each helped protect the other. Armor was great for disposing of machine-gun nests that could hang infantry up for days. Ground pounders returned the favor by spotting lurking soldiers or guns.

Broad-winged Heinkel 111s and slim Dornier bombers—Flying Pencils, people called them—gave Prague one more dose of modern war. Antiaircraft shells burst all around them. Not many Avias rose to challenge the bombers. The little biplanes sure looked as if they came out of the last war, but they’d given Germany’s fancy new 109s all they wanted and then some. The Messerschmitts hadn’t knocked them out of the sky. Bombers had finally plastered so many Czech airstrips that few Avias could get off the ground.

A Czech machine gun up ahead barked. Ludwig got ready to dive back into the turret. Anybody who talked about how the Slavs were a bunch of
Untermenschen
had never run into Czech engineering—or Czech infantry, for that matter. The guys in the brown uniforms knew what they were doing. They meant business, too.

Then, all of a sudden, the machine gun fell silent. So did all the guns
on the Czech side. Little by little, German firing also wound down. Fritz’s voice floated out of the speaking tube: “What’s going on?”

“Beats me,” Ludwig answered. “Stay ready for anything. It’s liable to be some kind of trick.”

“Don’t worry. My asshole’s puckered good and tight,” the driver said. Ludwig laughed. Then he wondered why. If you hadn’t shit yourself or come close, you hadn’t really been in combat.

A Czech officer with a flag of truce came out from behind a battered house. He was an older man, old enough to have started out in the Austro-Hungarian army. He walked toward Ludwig’s panzer, probably because it was the closest vehicle with a German cross on it. “Will you take me back to your commanders?” he called. Sure as hell, his German had a cloyingly sweet Vienna accent, with Slavic palatals under that.